SYMPTOMS - PEURPERAL ECLAMPSIA.
1. There is a considerable number of pregnant women in whose urine during the latter months of pregnancy albumin is present in appreciable quantities; they have no other symptoms and pass through labor without trouble.
2. There are women who, during the latter months of pregnancy, have scanty and albuminous urine, more or less dropsy of the legs, and become pale and anaemic. They may pass through childbirth safely and do well afterward, but some of them have a chronic ne phritis dating from the pregnancy.
3. In a small number of women at about the time of childbirth, either before, during, or after labor, there are cerebral symptoms. In some of these women albumin has been present in the urine during the pregnancy; in others, besides the albuminuria, dropsy and have also been present; but in others the cerebral symptoms are sud denly developed without any premonitory conditions.
The cerebral attacks are characterized by nausea and vomiting, headache, blindness, muscular twitchings, general convulsions, stupor, coma, hemiplegia, a rise of temperature, a pulse of high tension, venous congestion of the skin; the urine is diminished in quantity or suppressed, and usually contains large quantities of albumin. The
cases vary as to how many of these symptoms are present. A fair proportion of the patients survive these attacks, although the children usually die. In the fatal cases death takes place with general con vulsions, with hemiplegia, or with coma.
After the termination of the labor and the disappearance of the alarming symptoms the anxieties of the obstetrician are at an end, but those of the physician begin. For in many of these women a ne phritis originates during pregnancy, which continues afterward as a chronic inflammation and ultimately destroys life.